Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and the like. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources.
A wireless communication network may include a number of base stations that can support communication for a number of mobile devices. In some technologies, mobile devices may be called access terminals, user equipments (UEs), mobile stations, and the like. A mobile device may communicate with a base station via downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) transmissions. The downlink (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the base station to the mobile device, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the mobile device to the base station. Each base station has a coverage range, which may be referred to as the coverage area of the cell. Networks may include cells of different power classes to serve different and potentially overlapping coverage areas. For example, a macrocell is used to describe a cell serving a wide region such as rural, suburban, and urban areas. Smaller cells may be deployed in homes, small businesses, buildings, or other limited regions. These small cells fall into different classes such as picocells or femtocells. Picocells may be connected to a service provider's network or a macrocell via a direct backhaul. Femtocells are often connected to a service provider's network via broadband connections or other mediums.
Mobile devices may experience interference from transmissions to and from other cells and mobile devices in the network. On the downlink, inter-cell interference may occur at a mobile device due to transmissions from other cells and mobile devices served by the other cells. Intra-cell interference to a mobile device may occur due to transmissions to and from other mobile devices by the serving cell of the mobile device. Similarly, base stations may experience interference on uplink transmissions from mobile devices. Mobile devices and base stations may include capabilities for advanced interference management including interference cancellation (IC). Some interference cancellation techniques depend on identifying various parameters used for transmission of the interfering signal and using these parameters to estimate the received signal and reconstruct the transmitted interfering signal for interference cancellation. While these techniques can provide superior interference cancellation performance in some circumstances, challenges may arise in determining when to apply these techniques and how to manage the use of multiple interference cancellation techniques.